Rundling

A Rundling is a primitive form of circular village, mainly in Germany, typical of settlements in the Germanic-Slav contact zone in the Early Medieval period.

The Rundling was a relatively common village form used by the Slavs. It usually comprises a central, circular village green owned in common with individually owned farmsteads radiating out around it like the spokes of a wheel.The best examples are now only in a small area of Lower Saxony in Germany near to the town of Lüchow. 15 of these villages have been put forward as an ensemble for consideration as possible World Heritage Sites, and a decision is expected in the next few years.

At the City Hall Oslo on 11 June 2015 the Rundlingsverein were awarded the Grand Prix for the European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage/Europa Nostra Award 2015. This was in recognition of 46 years of voluntary work in preserving these ancient settlements.

Such villages were originally found across a strip of central Germany from Kiel to Bohemia (where they are variously referred to as a Rundling, Runddorf, Rundlingsdorf, Rundplatzdorf or Platzdorf), often indicated by village names ending in -itz, -ow and -thin. Nowadays the word "Rundling" should only be used for those villages with a specific settlement structure described by Professor Meibeyer. Virtually all such Rundlinge are now only to be found in the small area of Wendland.

There are no contemporary historical records of the founding of these circular villages, but a consensus has arisen in recent decades that they were founded in the 12th century, on land that had not been previously cultivated, probably because of its essentially low lying boggy nature, its tendency to be flooded and the relative poverty of its sandy soil. The current leading theory is that of Professor Dr Wolfgang Meibeyer, who believes that all the Rundlinge were developed at more or less the same time in the 12th century, to a model developed by the then Germanic nobility as suitable for small groups of mainly Slavic farm-settlers. Whether these settlers were there by choice, by conquest or by forced settlement is no longer known. It does seem to have happened without much bloodshed, and the following centuries showed a living together of Germans and Slavs. This eventually led to an assimilation and eventual disappearance of the Slavs as a separate ethnic group with their own language, Wendish (Wendisch) or Polabian (dravänopolabisch), which is the language used for the majority of the Rundling names, and still to this day for certain unusual features of local rural architecture and land-use. This separate Slavic language did however remain more generally in use in the region of Lüchow until the 18th century, and there is a written chronicle and dictionary still in existence drawn up by Johann Parum Schultze of the village of Süthen, in around 1725, which marks the increasing loss of the old language. The area of its historical use is now often called Wendland after those Slavic peoples who were called the Wends, and it corresponds more or less with the current administrative boundaries of the district of Lüchow-Dannenberg. Two related Slavic ethnic groups were the Wenden of the Spreewald and the Lusatian Sorbs of Upper Lusatia (Oberlausitz), together making a group of about 60,000 who still are said to be able to speak Sorbian in the Spreewald, an area of Eastern Germany near the Polish border around the towns of Bautzen and Cottbus.

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